Tree of Life and Death (16 page)

"Has Jayne been a guild member for long?"

Dee looked to Emma, who supplied the details. "Longer than I have, so more than five years. She isn't from Danger Cove originally though. All I know is her ex-husband teaches at the high school, and that's why they moved here. They never had kids, and she works in retail in one of the surrounding towns, but I'm not sure which one. I try to avoid conversations with her, although I usually can't help eavesdropping. Her voice cuts through everything, but she's almost always talking about quilts, not her job or anything personal. That's probably why we tolerate her. Listening to her pontificate about a subject we enjoy is bad enough. If she went on and on about things we weren't interested in, it would be torture."

"She really is well intentioned," Dee said. "I just wish she'd relax a little. For her sake, as well as everyone else's."

I still didn't understand why Jayne would intentionally lie to the police about her identity. I hadn't caught the entirety of the conversation between Jayne and Fred, so maybe I'd misunderstood. Perhaps Jayne hadn't been identifying herself, but had been indirectly telling the officer how to do his job by giving him the name of someone she thought he should interview. That did sound like something Jayne would do. Maybe Dee or Emma would recognize the name Jayne had given.

"I'm starting to realize just how little I know about the quilt guild's members, other than you two," I said. "I was hoping to meet some of them in person today after having corresponded with them online. There's one in particular that I wanted to talk to. Her name is Jenny Smith."

After a glance at Emma, who shook her head, Dee said, "There are a couple of Jennys in the guild, but no Jenny Smith."

"I must have remembered part of the name wrong." Or heard it wrong. I was certain about the last name though. That had come through loud and clear. "Perhaps a Smith with a different first name?"

Emma shook her head. "There aren't any Smiths in the guild. You'd think there'd be at least one in a group of close to a hundred, if you count the people who occasionally come from out of town, but it's not all that common a name here."

"We could ask around for you," Dee said. "Try to figure out who it was."

"It's not that important." I noticed Meg return from her latest bathroom trip. Jayne turned around as if she had some sort of early warning system for her mentor's presence. In a moment, Jayne was going to notice that no one was doing any quilt making. "Jayne is going to start cracking the whip any minute now. I don't want to be blamed for keeping you from your work."

Emma handed two unstitched pieces of fabric to Dee. "We don't have anything left to sew after this, and no one's doing any gophering. I'll go see what I can rustle up for us to work on."

Emma left, and Dee placed the fabric squares under the sewing machine's foot. She tromped on the pedal, but I could swear the motor sounded slower and sadder than before.

I left Dee to her work and headed for the doors to see if Fred had found my phone, so I could claim to be doing something useful if Jayne decided to single me out for a lecture.

I had to remind myself that even though she was the one person here I wouldn't feel bad about sending to jail, there wasn't any evidence that she'd done anything criminal. She probably had a perfectly reasonable explanation for giving the cops a name that wasn't hers, something totally irrelevant to the homicide investigation and absolutely none of my business.

Unless, of course, Jayne was somehow involved in Alan Miller's murder, and that was why she'd given the police false information. Then, it was my business, if only because I felt some responsibility for what had happened to Alan. Plus, I'd promised Stefan I'd do what I could to keep Sunny from being wrongly accused of the murder, and I hadn't come up with anything solid.

The female officer stationed at the door kept a close eye on me but didn't prevent me from stepping out into the hall to look for Fred. He was near the stairwells that led down to the first floor, talking to someone on his phone. He showed me that he had my phone in his jacket pocket and then held up one finger to ask me to wait a minute. I stepped back inside the boardroom to give him some privacy. Just then, Matt said something to his groupies at the cutting table, and they wandered off, leaving him behind.

Matt beckoned me over to the deserted cutting table. "Half the people in the room look like they're attending a wake for young Mr. Miller," Matt said.

"There'd be more smiling at a wake." I nodded at where the unnamed replacement for Faria stood. "And fewer police officers."

Matt waved a greeting at the officer and asked me, "Did you find out anything about the thimble?"

"No. You?"

He shook his head. "Sorry. I asked, but the ones I talked to are all machine quilters, not hand quilters. They said Trudy might know, but I think it would be better if you asked her. I make her nervous."

Before I could answer, I saw that the intense conversation between Meg and Jayne was breaking up. Meg strode past me over to the white board and clapped her hands, proving that she could get everyone's attention without Jayne's assistance.

"You all know what a hard taskmaster I am," Meg said. "You've had a much-longer lunch break than we'd planned, and the ornaments won't make themselves. It's time for us all to get back to work now."

No one moved.

Meg continued. "Look, I know it's difficult to think about anything other than this morning's tragedy, but no one's ever said that quilting was easy, right?"

Most of the women nodded, and a few responded with a smile and a halfhearted, "Right." Even Jayne's shrill agreement barely registered.

Meg acted as if she'd received a rousing chorus of support. "That's settled then. We have plenty of supplies and nowhere to go until the police finish their work, so let's see how many ornaments we can make. I'm betting that the museum will need the biggest tree on the West Coast to fit them all. Are you with me?"

This time, Meg did get a bit more enthusiasm. It might have been because Jayne was mingling with the volunteers. She bore down on one group of women leaning against the conference table, and they promptly scurried over to take up positions at various workstations. The sound of the sewing machines began to fill the room.

Matt went over to where he and Carl had been working earlier, where he could keep a close reporter's eye on the comings and goings of everyone involved with the investigation, police and witnesses alike. Within a couple of minutes, all of the various workstations were occupied by volunteers with a renewed sense of purpose.

Trudy headed toward where Jayne had been basting the layers of the ornaments together, only to be cut off by three BFFs who didn't notice her as they took over that station. Trudy turned in a circle, searching for someplace she might be useful, and ended up standing next to me.

Before I could ask her about thimbles, Meg bustled over to us. "You can be a gopher again," Meg told Trudy. "I think Dee and Emma already have some rows that need ironing, if you could fetch them."

Asking about the thimble found at the crime scene would have to wait, if I didn't want to draw too much attention to the topic.

Trudy headed off on her mission, obviously relieved to have a purpose. Fred was still out in the hall, and I didn't want to stand around looking useless while I waited. Not with Jayne on the hunt for slackers.

I turned to Meg. "Is there anything I can do? Something that doesn't involve cutting, sewing, or ironing?"

"You can be a gopher too, once the work starts to pile up," Meg said. "Although right now, what would really help is if you'd take my place while I run to the ladies' room again. Just keep an eye out for anyone who looks confused or upset, tell them they're doing fine, and keep them calm until I get back."

"I can do that." I doubted any real supervision was necessary, since Jayne was already making a circuit of the room like an exam-room proctor, swooping down on anyone who was doing something imperfectly. Actually, that might be the real reason why Meg wanted someone to keep an eye on the room: to make sure Jayne didn't escalate the tension. "I'm good at watching other people work."

"Thanks." Meg rushed off, with the female officer following her out into the hallway.

As they left, Fred came inside, carrying my phone. He handed it to me, and I sent the picture of the Tree of Life quilt to the address Ohlsen had given me.

As I handed the phone back to Fred, I asked, "Any idea how much longer before Ohlsen will be ready to interview us and let us go home? I'm not sure how much longer everyone's renewed sense of purpose is going to last. My guess is it won't take long before people start getting restless."

"I wish I knew." Fred reached into the pocket where the bakery bag had been earlier, only to come up empty. "My wife and I were supposed to be doing some Christmas shopping today. Sally knows my schedule can be unpredictable, but she still gets irritated sometimes when I have to put in some unexpected overtime. I've got to admit the overtime pay will come in handy this time of year, but it's not like I'm happy someone got killed, just because it got me out of doing some chores and added a few bucks to my paycheck."

Jayne finished her circuit of the room and took a break from criticizing her fellow quilters by focusing on a new target: Fred. She turned her back on the room to ask him, "How much longer can it possibly take your colleagues to clear one tiny little crime scene?" Jayne's voice was shrill enough that the women at the cutting table less then ten feet away could certainly hear every word distinctly. The female officer in the hallway could probably catch the gist of Jayne's complaint too. For a woman who might be hiding a secret behind a false name, Jayne wasn't exactly keeping a low profile.

Fred was too well trained to rise to her bait. "It shouldn't be much longer, ma'am." He didn't stick around to hear her response but headed back out into the hall, leaving me as the sole audience for her rant.

"It's just so inefficient," she said. "I could have collected all the necessary information from the witnesses in half the time, without forcing a work stoppage. We'll never reach our target for completed ornaments now."

"Meg seemed confident that there will be plenty of ornaments."

Jayne snorted. "Only if she makes them herself at home after we're done here."

"As long as they get done in time for Christmas," I said, "does it really matter how or when? A young man is dead, after all. I'm sure the museum will be fine with a few less ornaments than planned."

"It's just not fair," Jayne insisted. "Why did that guy have to get killed today? He shouldn't even have been here. He wasn't a quilter, and he didn't appreciate the quilt enough to take proper care of it. I could tell that much from across the room when he spread it out on your table. Meg and I were both impressed by the design, but then we saw how tattered it was. Meg was appalled at the disrespect that had been shown to a work of art."

"Still, mistreating a quilt isn't a capital offense," I said.

"I know that," Jayne said, irritability adding to the shrillness of her tone. "But little things can tell you a lot about a person. I can tell you how another person's quilt is going to turn out just from seeing how a person treats her tools. It's the same way with understanding people. You could see that Alan didn't take care of anything he owned, not his quilt, not his clothes, not even his own body. He probably did all sorts of things that were bad for him. That's what got him killed, nothing to do with the museum or the quilters."

"Things that might seem obvious to you still need to be proven in court," I said, a bit stunned at Jayne's belief that she had deep insights into human behavior. "The police need more than speculation, and credible evidence takes time to gather. We're luckier than most crime scene witnesses. We're not stuck here with nothing to do but sit and wait. We have plenty to keep us busy."

Jayne sighed and turned around to face the room, crossing her arms over her chest. "Busy, sure. But that's not the same as productive. We're going to have to unstitch at least half of the blocks before we can use them. No one's paying proper attention to their work."

Meg hurried in from the hallway in time to catch Jayne's last words. "It doesn't matter if some of the blocks are less than perfect. We'll just pretend we intended them to be that way, like Matt does."

Jayne mellowed instantly. "That's brilliant! We could add some uneven borders to emphasize the effect. I'll go see how many blocks need that treatment."

Once she was gone, Meg said, "I'm sorry if Jayne's been irritating you. I keep hoping that with enough classroom experience she might mellow enough to be an effective teacher. She's such a brilliant quilter, and people could learn so much from her if she didn't set their nerves on edge. I can't seem to get through to her though. Probably because teaching just comes naturally to me. I get along with people as easily as she annoys them."

"Fortunately, there's room for both of you in the quilting world," I said. "Now that you're back, I'd better go do some gophering before Jayne notices that I'm not doing anything."

"And I'd better get back to soothing the feathers that Jayne has ruffled." Meg leaned in to speak in a quiet tone meant only for my ears. "Thanks for watching the room for me. One of these days I'm going to give in and wear an adult diaper during workshops so I don't have to leave so often. At least today my bladder issues turned out to be something of a blessing. I was in the ladies' room when the screaming started, and it took a couple of minutes before I could leave. By the time I got to the back door, you and that reporter had everything under control, so I didn't have to take charge. I wouldn't have known what to do at a crime scene."

"Matt is good in emergencies," I said humbly, although I was rather pleased that I'd managed not to pass out during the crisis.

Meg frowned. "It's a little odd though. I would have expected Jayne to be right there on the spot, telling everyone what to do. I didn't see her on the back steps though. I wonder where she was."